COMMUNICATION AS CREED: FIRST AMENDMENT UNIFICATION

[T]he low carnival is never far from the High Church.
­James Twitchell ¹⁵³

[P]op culture [is] an eruption of the never­defeated paganism of the West.
­Camille Paglia ¹⁵⁴

James Madison, the creator of the First Amendment, could envision a nation where the constitutional divide between church and state was demarcated. The language of the First Amendment suggests as much. Its first sixteen words, granting protections for the American religious experience, were separated from the protections of speech, press, and assembly set forth in its last twenty­ nine words. Thus conceived, the text of the Amendment distinguished the religious from the political, the pious from the profane.

In contrast, the cultural boundaries between the spiritual and the secular in America have not proven as clear. After all, as Max Lerner put it, Americans tend "to find their religious faith in various forms of belief about their own existence as a people." ¹⁵⁵ Indeed, Walt Whitman conjectured that "the whole mass of American mentality, taste, belief" ¹⁵⁶ is to be mediated and influenced by the artistic spirit: "The priest departs, the divine literatus comes." ¹⁵⁷ However viewed, the wait for Whitman's "divine literatus" has yet to prove worth the candle. Modern­day America has found its own solution­ the divine Carnival.

In our popular culture, many of those who oversee the symbols assigned to our notions of truth and value are not our parish priests, ministers, or rabbis, but rather the Carnival's barkers. The American pilgrim would likely prefer the shrine at Graceland to that at Fatima. In fact, worshippers attend to the popular rock hymns of Paul Simon ¹⁵⁸ and Marc Cohn ¹⁵⁹ dedicated to the "miracle" of Graceland. Moreover, commercial television can be to the modern Carnival what the Holy Script was to the medieval monastery. The popularity of televangelism alone attests to this transformation. Reflecting on this phenomenon, Professor Twitchell remarks that the religion of the "electronic church" ¹⁶⁰ promises "release, not in the next world, but in this one. Wishes are fulfilled, not later, but NOW. Gratification," he adds, "is instant because for the first time it can be. There is so much to look at, so much to see." ¹⁶¹

Indeed, the blending of faith and fantasy is essential to the ideology of the Carnival. Not only may the ecclesiastical experience be played out in a variety of sideshows, but a profound and unquestioning belief in amusement itself is rapidly becoming our creed, and communion with its spectacles our daily bread. "'We may not be conscious of it,"' explains media mogul Martin Esslin, "'but television culture is the religion by which most of us actually live, whatever our more consciously and explicitly held beliefs ... may be. This is the actual religion that is being absorbed by our children from almost the day of their birth."' ¹⁶² The faithful are those who believe in the Carnival's Gospel, perhaps with a bit of agnostic hope thrown in for security's sake.

Once again, those who embrace a cultural approach to the First Amendment understand that, in all of this, the Madisonian mandate has itself taken on a new meaning. Broadly speaking, the first sixteen words once could be viewed as safeguarding a nonrational faith in God, whereas the last twenty­nine could be seen as securing rational self­government. Now, as nonrationality commingles with rationality, and as nonreligious expression assumes religious import, we witness the unification of the First Amendment's two major components. The free speech clause merges with its free exercise analogue. Theoretically, the ultimately "preferred position" in constitutional values could be reserved for Carnival talk. And as the protectorate of the Carnival, the First Amendment itself could become a religious symbol, the new Sacred Writ. No wonder, then, that Americans adore their First Amendment freedoms.